I don’t think there’s any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if...

What she needs,’ Tom said aloud ‘is a husband.’ Agnes said crisply, ‘Well, she can’t have mine.

Why is it that those who want to destroy everything good about their country are the quickest to waive the national flag?

He did not really understand the game they were playing: in his world, the best way to get something was to deserve it, not to toady to the giver.

There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.

Two blades clashed, ringing like a bell. Like all small boys, Philip thought his father was invincible; and this was the moment when he learned the truth.

I enjoy learning technical details.

In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England’s postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat’s garden is commandeered to allow the people to...

Why did people manufacture trouble when there was already so much of it in the world?

the war taught me that nothing counts as much as loyalty” “Bullshit. you still haven’t learned that when humans are under pressure, we’re all willing to lie” “even to the people we care?” “we lie...

It was the study hour. Most of the monks were reading. A few were meditating, an activity that was suspiciously similar to dozing.

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.

L’eccesso di orgoglio è un peccato molto diffuso, ma un uomo può frustrare altrettanto facilmente il volere di Dio per eccesso di umiltà.

I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn’t happen, but it might have.

She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic.

There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.

He was like a man who has got used to drinking the finest wine, and now finds that everyday wine thats like vinegar.

Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless...

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them...

I use a professional researcher in New York who does all the legwork, all that stuff which would take me days and weeks of calling, waiting for people to call back.